Success?

I got the job. 

I keep waiting for it to be a joke, to wake up and be disappointed, to have them come back and say, "Just kidding."  I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It feels like a dream, like something unreal.

The other day, when I was talking about how it hadn't sunk in and relieved all my tension, my acupuncturist talked about chronic pain and how funny it is that even when the pain is not there, a lot of times we can't just relax and be content because we're always worried that we'll do something wrong if we're not careful, and it will come back with a vengeance.  It's a mental pattern that's hard to break out of.  We need to enjoy the times when the pain is absent or muted.  Maybe it will come back, but it's gone now.

I look forward to experiencing that absence of pain at some point, and I was nodding at how much her statement made sense when I realized that she was gently telling me to just enjoy the now and be glad that things went well and seem to be moving in a new direction.  I am a little slow sometimes.

Donald Miller said, ". . . I will readily accept a failure, even meditate on it, but I won’t accept an accomplishment.  There’s nothing healthy about that."

Zing.  (Direct hit.)  We'll thank the Lord for the good and assume the bad is our fault.  We'll accept the good from the Lord but not the bad, as Job implied.  Is that the way it's supposed to be? 

While I was in the middle of the increasing-bad, Christians would use language that indicated that God would rescue me from this attack of Satan, that this bad couldn't possibly be from God, etc.  I struggled with that because it smacked of that pesky, unbiblical prosperity gospel to me.  Does our success = God's favor?  I wondered. 

I think that our failures do not = God's displeasure.  We learn and grow from failures as well as successes.  Some lessons can only be learned in one place or the other.   It's how life works in a fallen world full of fallen people with free will.

I wonder if this is part of the secret of being content in all circumstances.

Any thoughts or wisdom you want to share?